Drivers are cutting back as gasoline prices climb

More Americans are weighing the need to drive before every trip.

NEW YORK (AP) — Cabbies here complain their take-home pay is thinner than it used to be. Trucking companies across the country are making drivers slow down to conserve fuel. Filling station owners plead that really, really, the skyrocketing prices aren’t their fault.

And the rest of us? With gas prices now averaging $3.51 a gallon nationwide, according to AAA and the Oil Price Information Service, more and more Americans who have to drive are weighing the need for each and every trip.

“To get to the doctor’s and all that, it’s an awful lot of money,” said Carol Licata, a 75-year-old retiree from Arnold, Pa., who said a larger portion of her fixed income is now going toward gas. “I don’t drive that often but have to take necessary trips ... and [gas] takes a big chunk out of our budget.”

Some would-be drivers are considering less energy-dependent alternatives simply for money’s sake.

In Los Angeles, for example, fiction writer Brian Edwards sold his gas-guzzling Ford truck and now relies on his skateboard or the bus to get around. Sharon Cooper of Chicago, meanwhile, said she is planning to buy a bicycle to use on her 21‚Ñ2-mile commute to work.

And everyone, it seems, is more than willing to join in the griping.

“It’s hell,” said legal aide Zebib Yemane, who spent $5 on gas for her Chevy compact at a 76 station in downtown Los Angeles just so she could make it to a cheaper gas station east of the area.

“When going downhill, I used to step on the gas. Now I don’t,” said Yemane, who said she normally spends $80 a week on fuel and asks people for rides and takes the bus to save money.

“Bottom line, we can’t afford it no more, man. It’s too much,” Bak Zoumane said as he filled up his yellow cab at a BP station in midtown Manhattan. The West African immigrant said his next car will likely be a hybrid so he won’t have to pay so much at the pump.

Gasoline prices typically rise in the spring as stations switch over to pricier summer-grade fuel and demand picks up as more travelers take to the road.

But this year prices are rising even faster than normal, experts say, because of the massive jump in benchmark crude prices, which spiked above $118 a barrel for the first time Tuesday.

Those soaring prices are putting added strain on refiners and filling-station operators, which are struggling to pass the higher feedstock costs onto consumers. So even as drivers pay more, retailers — the most public face of the oil business — are getting increasingly squeezed.

“The farther you get from the wellhead, the greater the misery,” said Tom Kloza of the Oil Price Information Service in Wall, N.J. “There’s a lot of stations across the country that are literally on the brink of bankruptcy.”

Samer Katib, the manager of a Marathon station in Chicago, said business has fallen at least 30 percent this year because customers are cutting back on driving and only using their cars when absolutely necessary.

“It’s just go to your work and go home,” he said of people’s driving habits these days, adding that customers no longer stop in for profit-fattening drinks like they used to. “They need all their money for gas,” he said.

“I wish I could make gas prices cheaper,” Katib added. “But if we do that, we cannot survive.”